Nobody needs to impress the salesman - Sidharth Kakkar
Sidharth Kakkar
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Nobody needs to impress the salesman<br>The salesperson was never there for the persuasion. They were just there to help with limited working memory.
Sidharth Kakkar<br>Jul 16, 2026
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Exploring the world got ruined by machines<br>Growing up, it always blew my mind how many places in the world my dad had visited. From Seoul to Constanta to Rotterdam, he had explored so many cities in so many places. And he had stories in each of those places too - the food he tried, the people he met, the sights he saw.<br>Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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My dad was a marine engineer, which meant he did the engineering work on container ships. And back in the 70s, when a container ship reached port, it took a week to unload, and for my dad that meant a week of exploring a new place was one of the perks of the job.<br>My dad left the ship life when he had kids, and lucky him because that perk vanished soon after. Ships typically leave port within 18 hours of arriving now because of containerization. The perk is gone, the people working the ships shed a tear, but then the world moved on without any debate. Obviously they weren’t going to hang out at the port if it’s not necessary.<br>Sales is safe, though<br>As we all reckon with container-level of disruption to all our jobs, a narrative I keep hearing is that the machines will probably take the thinking jobs, but that the humans will keep the convincing jobs. The writing is on the wall for code, accounting, legal letters, ops, analysis, but the art of convincing another person will have to be done by another human. I don’t think the claim is that the AI can draft legal memos but cannot write persuasion, but rather that no human will want to be persuaded by a machine.<br>This assumes that the salesperson sells persuasion, but there’s more to it than that. Sales does two jobs: 1) telling people you exist, and 2) helping a buyer who can’t possibly collect and parse all the facts make a call anyway. When a VP Finance is buying A/R software and staring at forty vendors and matching them against three hundred internal requirements1, there’s no chance it’s all fitting in working memory. She’s just gotta pick.<br>So, she swaps the question she can’t answer - is vendor X the optimal choice balancing our needs and costs and friction to implement - with one she can answer - do I like this sales guy. And this means that the “sales jobs will be safe” narrative is built on safety that was never the salesperson’s, it was borrowed from the buyer.<br>Will she continue to lend him that safety? Will she even have it to give away? I’m not so sure.<br>If she’s still the one buying, working memory is becoming less of a constraint. She’s not alone in computing the multivariate mess that is buying an expensive product. More information never disrupted the mediators of a sale, because more information still had to fit in a human head. This wave is different. It doesn’t hand her information. It hands her the decision.<br>But since the premise of this whole argument is that all the jobs except convincing jobs are being done by AI anyway, it’s not clear the decision will be hers! An agent who is buying has a context window that’s at least 1 million tokens, far outstripping the VP Finance’s working memory, and it can read all the marketing materials from all 40 vendors in eleven seconds, including the parts about the founders developing their life’s ambition of building invoicing software starting in the second grade.<br>So if an agent is buying, the salesperson better be ready to persuade an agent. But look at what it takes to persuade an agent: content, evidence, benchmarks, case studies, ranking. That’s not sales, that’s marketing. It’s hard to imagine a salesperson optimizing their benchmark tables for tokenization by GPT-9.3.<br>The salesperson was never the persuasion vehicle. The salesperson just helped you work around your limited context window as a human.<br>Navigating politics<br>What if the job wasn’t persuasion, but to be a guide for the enterprise champion to navigate their internal politics to buy the product? For a champion in a large organization to buy something, they have to fight other budget claimants, security review, a CFO. And if the purchase goes poorly, she personally eats it.<br>So the sales guy helps: he provide a deck that the champion presents as their own. He creates the ROI case. He provides the right peer reference. He gives the champion the 11pm pump up call before the big exec review meeting. He helps her turn “I like this sales guy” vibes into a scoring matrix with an answer to the third decimal place. The sales guy is a co-conspirator.<br>I don’t think the political campaign part of a purchase is going away - I suspect that for a long time to come, a human signature will be required on a six+ figure purchase. But the salesperson will be less needed than ever. They...